Game Details

There are times when the horror video game genre still feels like it's in its infancy, a clichéd mix of jump scares, shambling horrors, and gore-soaked scenery that should have long been buried. Sure, we all love the bloody dogs that leapt headfirst through a window in Resident Evil, and how we were forced to dive into a closet to hide from Silent Hill 2's ever-disturbing Pyramid Head, but the world has moved on. People have moved on. Isn't time the horror genre did too?

That's not say there haven't been some horror classics of late—the terrifying P.T. demo and the, uh, "quirky" Deadly Premonition spring to mind—but horror games that continue to disturb once the end credits roll are a rarity, not a standard. First-person adventure The Town of Light takes a brave, if under-realised, stab at presenting a fresh examination of what constitutes horror. The demons, zombies, and severed limbs so beloved of horror games—which are so overused as to have lost all impact—are discarded in favour of showing the grisly abuse, torture, and subjugation human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.

After all, we know the likes of brain-dead zombies and demonic horrors aren't real (right?). But human beings? They're something we can all be afraid of.

True, TheTown of Light isn't the first game to do this: The Last Of Us and the last two Fallout games excelled in this regard. But unlike those games, Town of Light makes its human cruelty all the more unpalatable by the fact that it's meted out with the best intentions. This is a game that's very much about psychological horror, rather than bloody murder.

The plot—which revolves around a young girl called Renée and her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital—isn't the most original of ideas on paper, but it evolves into something much darker. Institutionalised child abuse isn't the sort of subject matter games often tackle, nor is it one to be taken lightly. But as the medical staff around Renée begin to pick her apart by inches, and as she screams for them to stop, it's clear that The Town of Light isn't interested in horror trivialities. It soon becomes painfully apparent that no matter what Renée says, no matter how much she begs or screams, her pleas for mercy will not be listened to. The Town of Light is very much like being dumped into the shoes of Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby.

That The Town of Light is based in part on events that took place in reality, in a location that's currently still standing, only adds to its flesh-crawling atmosphere. The location in question is the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra psychiatric hospital in Tuscany, the ruins of which stand not too far away from the headquarters of the game’s developer, LKA. If this building looks anything like it does in the game as it does in real life—and the urban explorers that regularly venture inside heavily suggest that it does—then Volterra is one of the best environments for a horror story since director Brad Anderson came across the Danvers State Mental Hospital, which became the location for the movie Session 9.

Volterra is a crumbling ruin, filled with rusted iron railings, cracked paint, and dank rooms linked together by the longest and darkest of dusty corridors. The atmosphere is so oppressive you could choke on it. Unlike Session 9, however, TheTown of Light isn't interested in manufacturing scares rooted in supernatural occurrences. It doesn’t need them. As I wandered through the hospital I realised that I'm not so much playing a game as I am on a sort of documentary-like journey with the game's narrator, Renée, as she tries to piece together the horrors of her past.

Further Reading

Renée, it turns out, was once an inmate at Volterra; she was committed to the asylum just before World War II. She's returned to find closure and as you wander the musty, graffiti-covered walls of her old home, you come across spaces or objects that trigger flashbacks to a time when Renée was a patient rather than an explorer. When this happens, the colour bleeds out of the picture, casting the staffed and fully operational hospital in an impersonal, clinical monochrome.

It's in these moments The Town Of Light delivers its sharpest bites. The horrors visited on Renée—played out in collections of static sketches—are legion; beyond being manhandled by faceless orderlies, she becomes the victim of incarceration, brutality, and sexual abuse. The few moments of happiness she experiences seem to exist only to be snatched away, sending her spiralling back down into misery. The impact on her mind is traumatic, so much so that the more time I spent with her, the more unreliable a narrator I found her to be.